The Odds of That

Published: August 11, 2002

(Page 5 of 9)

Adds John Allen Paulos: ''Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It might just be part of our biology that conspires to make coincidences more meaningful than they really are. Look at the natural world of rocks and plants and rivers: it doesn't offer much evidence for superfluous coincidences, but primitive man had to be alert to all anomalies and respond to them as if they were real.''

For decades, all academic talk of coincidence has been in the context of the mathematical. New work by scientists like Joshua B. Tenenbaum, an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T., is bringing coincidence into the realm of human cognition. Finding connections is not only the way we react to the extraordinary, Tenenbaum postulates, but also the way we make sense of our ordinary world. ''Coincidences are a window into how we learn about things,'' he says. ''They show us how minds derive richly textured knowledge from limited situations.''

To put it another way, our reaction to coincidence shows how our brains fill in the factual blanks. In an optical illusion, he explains, our brain fills the gaps, and although people take it for granted that seeing is believing, optical illusions prove that's not true. ''Illusions also prove that our brain is capable of imposing structure on the world,'' he says. ''One of the things our brain is designed to do is infer the causal structure of the world from limited information.''

If not for this ability, he says, a child could not learn to speak. A child sees a conspiracy, he says, in that others around him are obviously communicating and it is up to the child to decode the method. But these same mechanisms can misfire, he warns. They were well suited to a time of cavemen and tigers and can be overloaded in our highly complex world. ''It's why we have the urge to work everything into one big grand scheme,'' he says. ''We do like to weave things together.

''But have we evolved into fundamentally rational or fundamentally irrational creatures? That is one of the central questions.''

We pride ourselves on being independent and original, and yet our reactions to nearly everything can be plotted along a predictable spectrum. When the grid is coincidences, one end of the scale is for those who believe that these are entertaining events with no meaning; at the other end are those who believe that coincidence is never an accident.

The view of coincidence as fate has lately become something of a minitrend in the New Age section of bookstores. Among the more popular authors is SQuire Rushnell (who, in the interest of marketing, spells his first name with a capital Q). Rushnell spent 20 years producing such television programs as ''Good Morning America'' and ''Schoolhouse Rock.'' His fascination with coincidence began when he learned that both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same July 4, 50 years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence.

''That stuck in my craw,'' Rushnell says, ''and I couldn't stop wondering what that means.'' And so Rushnell wrote ''When God Winks: How the Power of Coincidence Guides Your Life.'' The book was published by a small press shortly before Sept. 11 and sold well without much publicity. It will be rereleased with great fanfare by Simon & Schuster next month. Its message, Rushnell says, is that ''coincidences are signposts along your universal pathway. They are hints that you are going in the right direction or that you should change course. It's like your grandmother sitting across the Thanksgiving table from you and giving you a wink. What does that wink mean? 'I'm here, I love you, stay the course.'''

During my interview with Rushnell, I told him the following story: On a frigid December night many years ago, a friend dragged me out of my warm apartment, where I planned to spend the evening in my bathrobe nursing a cold. I had to come with her to the movies, she said, because she had made plans with a pal from her office, and he was bringing a friend for me to meet. Translation: I was expected to show up for a last-minute blind date. For some reason, I agreed to go, knocking back a decongestant as I left home. We arrived at the theater to find that the friend who was supposed to be my ''date'' had canceled, but not to worry, another friend had been corralled as a replacement. The replacement and I both fell asleep in the movie (I was sedated by cold medicine; he was a medical resident who had been awake for 36 hours), but four months later we were engaged, and we have been married for nearly 15 years.

Rushnell was enthralled by this tale, particularly by the mystical force that seemed to have nudged me out the door when I really wanted to stay home and watch ''The Golden Girls.'' I know that those on the other end of the spectrum -- the scientists and mathematicians -- would have offered several overlapping explanations of why it was unremarkable.

There are, of course, the laws of big numbers and small numbers -- the fact that the world is simultaneously so large that anything can happen and so small that weird things seem to happen all the time. Add to that the work of the late Amos Tversky, a giant in the field of coincidence theory, who once described his role in this world as ''debugging human intuition.'' Among other things, Tversky disproved the ''hot hand'' theory of basketball, the belief that a player who has made his last few baskets will more likely than not make his next. After examining thousands of shots by the Philadelphia 76ers, he proved that the odds of a successful shot cannot be predicted by the shots that came before.